Editorial

Greetings, TNT. I come in peace. I do, however, wish to ask you a question. I opened an NC Mall Sixth Birthday Goodie Bag and received a Six-rific Birthday Cupcake Candle Sparkler ticket. (Yay!) When I activate it and then click the link to visit the celebration, the sparklers aren't included in my sparkler count. Is there a step I missed somewhere? Thanks. ~pjpmoreno
The sparkler is for the cupcake on the left. :)

Hey, TNT. I recently got back into submitting for the Poetry Contest, but I'm a little surprised that the glitch with awarding prizes has yet to be fixed (although I'm not sure if this is the case for competitions aside from the Poetry Contest). I'm just wondering: has there been any work on fixing this so far? How long do you think it'll take to work out the programming issues? I apologize if I seem impatient; I just happen to be one of those people who is dependent on spotlight prizes as a major source of Neopoints. x.x Thank you for your understanding. ~sheynacruz
We're still working on fixing it; however, we have begun to manually give out prizes. It's pretty time-consuming, but we're working toward it, and everyone will be properly rewarded for their efforts. At this point, everyone who was missing a trophy / reward for Storytelling and Petpet Spotlight should be caught up now. If we missed you, please let our Support Department know. If you're waiting for Poetry or Caption Contest rewards, those are currently being worked on, so please hang tight while we get those out to you. There's no need to contact support if you're waiting for Poetry or CC rewards.

Hey, TNT! I've been coding on this site for over four years and I want to share my knowledge by writing a few coding guides. Would this type of thing be accepted in The Neopian Times? Thanks for the help! ~kadtastrophe
Sure! We'd love to see coding guides. Just make sure to use square brackets [ ] instead of angle brackets to indicate html. Otherwise, all of your lovely html will get eaten by the entry form.

Every 100th Lenny Conundrum round you guys always do something special: a difficult puzzle, usually related to previous LC rounds, and a unique Lenny Conundrum wizard-themed item. However, it seems the 500th LC passed without any fanfare. The wonderful saying "better late than never" certainly comes to mind, doesn't it? :D (Please remove my username, thank you!) ~username removed
Whoops. The Lenny Conundrum contest switched hands this past year, and it seems the poor soul now in charge of it missed that memo. We would like to make a special round, but we have decided to wait until the LC is acting a bit more... predictably than it has been recently.

The Grim Faerie Statue just took a few years of my life. Thanks, TNT! ~prpa
Our pleasure. We have commandeered your lost years of life force and injected it into our Meepit overlord so that he may--

MEEP.Nothing more to see here.We suggest you just continue reading. Quickly.

'Sup, TNT! I notice that a lot of people post on their User Lookups "Dear TNT: I log onto my account on several computers, please don't freeze me!" Isn't it kind of obvious that everyone does this? I'm just wondering whether you encourage people to make these notices, or think them unnecessary. Thanks a bunch of banana! ~glisteningwater
As we like to remind people from time to time, such notices are completely unnecessary. They actually reach over to the annoying side of the line, as others see them and think they need to do it, too... and BAM, an epidemic of "Dear TNT" notices that serve no purpose.

I just thought up of a GENIUS IDEA, and I can't believe the team hasn't thought of this! (If someone did, then how come you didn't use it?) Okay, here goes: *hands everyone a chocolate Chia* say you went to The Pound and made up your mind that you wanted a certain Neopet, but didn't know its name. SO, here's my idea: create an organizer that would help you look for the dream Neopet; one choice bar for colors and another for the species... but it's SEPARATE from the name lookup! ALSO, the limited edition Neopet rule still applies! GENIUS, isn't it? ~kadoatie_mermaid
That's actually how it used to work, but there was too much abuse going on. Anything remotely rare would be snapped up in an instant by cheaters. While our current system isn't perfect, and there are still cheaters about, it's much more fair than it used to be.

Dear TNT,
*throws six NC Mall birthday candles at you* As an avid book reader, I'd love to know how new book titles are chosen. My Neopet has just read "Happy Happy Peanuts." Next on my list is "No Longer Stranded In the Desert." Do you all just sit around a table asking each other for the first thing that comes into your head, or is there some actual kind of structure to it? I mean, who came up with '"Heirloom Courgettes" and "The Joy of Scratching"? :P ~babybenner
It's often inspired by conversations during lunch, as is most of everything on the site. Also, in case you haven't noticed, our Content Department is a little... odd, we'll say.

I'm just putting it out there that it would've been funnier if mutant JubJubs were just regular JubJubs with arms. ~faeriegirl2000
Why not go a step further and make mutant armed JubJubs shaved, footless Kikos? Actually, armed JubJubs was pretty much the design of the Fuzio.

TNT, can you believe that I turn thirty this fall, and that I still check the site on an almost daily basis? How many other players are even remotely that wizened and ancient? Two? I bet it's two. If you wanted to make a withered up old coot really happy this mutant day, I dream of seeing any sort of new Neopet, Petpet, accessory, weapon -- anything at all -- resembling the original, old school slimeball mutant Chia, which to this day is my favorite thing ever on the site! Who couldn't have loved those oozing, gangrenous little squishy faces? Even a minor shout-out or cameo by the forgotten mutants of yore would make my whole year less depressing. I don't have much time left to enjoy the site! Any day now I'll be in an old folks' home, trying desperately to figure out how to play Itchy Invasion on that newfangled telepathic holoweb all the whippersnappers will be talking about. ~scythemantis
If you think you're one of Neopets older Neopians, you're about to get a whooooole lot of Neomails informing you otherwise! ;) When we say Neopets is an all-ages site, we really mean it! So we suggest putting off buying a walker for several more decades.

Hopefully you'll still look better than the oldest version of the mutant Chia by that point!

Hey, TNT. I'm getting really scared because I stumbled upon a site against Neopets and I checked it out, curious to see what it had to say. I was laughing about trying to think of something wrong with Neopets, so I clicked on it and read an article that said you freeze people for fun. I'm really scared; I don't know if it's true or if people are just being mean. Please answer. ): ~dandycat123
Though some may paint us in a different light due to unfortunately having a bad experience on our site, we assure you we don't sit around gleefully hitting buttons to randomly freeze accounts. It's not good business practice. ;) Players are frozen for breaking the site rules, and that's it. Can misunderstandings happen? Yes, as we're all human beings here. If that does happen, we would hope that our Support Department would be able to rectify the situation. More often what happens is that people don't like to admit that they've done wrong, as they don't want others to think less of them, and so they point the finger at us. For example, we've seen players swear up and down that they're innocent to anyone who would listen, while secretly boasting about their crime on a side account. It's very disheartening, but we hope you can trust that we have everyone's best interests in mind. Just play by the rules, and don't stress about it! :)

So, I'm a member of a guild that I'm really not starting to like very much. It's a guild for Trades Chat members and they've made it a habit to monitor the Auction House for auctions they feel aren't "legit" and they go around posting the links to those auctions saying, "Look, *insertusername* is buying from a shell account again," or they Neomail users (most recently me) saying, "You do know that item you're buying is from a shell account, right?" How is this behavior not considered backseat monitoring? If I've not broken the rules and there's no way for ME to know if the account is a "shell," can I still get in trouble for buying an item from the account? Please, please, please clarify this for me, because it's becoming quite frustrating. It's as if these people think they are the trades / auction police. They seem to have all been silenced at one point or another, which makes me believe this behavior is reportable as well. Please remove my username. :) ~username removed
If they really think a bad trade or auction is going on, they need to report it immediately and let the monitors take care of it. Warning someone that they may be dealing with a scammer is one thing, but harassing people when they don't know for certain is not okay. They should report it and move on.

Is it Coma Star or Co Mastar? ~username removed
It's Coma Star. "Like the Death Star, but not quite dead yet."

(You see what we mean about the Content Department, right?)

I can totally understand and agree with the person from the previous Editorial who was ashamed to say that they didn't know how the Fish Negg looked like a fish. I just wanted to say, "anonymous player... you're not alone... there are others!" Oh, and could you end this Editorial with a picture of Plumpy chewing on Sloth's head? Thanks a bunch. ~jakynar
In honour of Artists on Vacation Day 2013, your wish has been granted.

Who knew Dr. Sloth tastes like bacon?

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